At three separate points in my screening of Love, Simon, a sizeable portion of the audience united in a collective “awwwww” – a satisfied, soft-hearted sigh, as if we had gathered for a big-screen showing of a YouTube cat video montage rather than a movie. I may have involuntarily joined in a couple of times: an unabashedly contrived story of a sweet, “straight-acting” high-schooler (lovable dreamboat Nick Robinson) drawn out of the closet when he strikes up an anonymous email friendship with another secretly gay schoolmate, Love, Simon is entirely adorable.

Love, Simon review – coming-out comedy is a landmark teen classic

Read more

“Adorable” is not a word we often use when discussing LGBT cinema, even at its most swooningly romantic. Films like Carol, Moonlight and Call Me by Your Name may make our eyes well up and our hearts beat a bit faster as their onscreen lovers come together, but there’s an undertow of tragedy – latent or narrowly averted – to their stories of love across (or against) social boundaries that staves off the “awwwwws”, that cuts deeper than cuteness, that leaves you thinking as much of loss and loneliness as romantic gratification when you leave the cinema.

Love, Simon is a different proposition in pretty much every respect. A gay teenage romcom from mass-market TV titan Greg Berlanti, it’s affecting and heartsore in all the right places, but comforting above all: you leave it with the same light wine-spritzer buzz you get from Bridget Jones’s Diary or 13 Going on 30, though its adolescent target audience shouldn’t even be that inebriated. Like Call Me by Your Name, it tells the story of a winsome 17-year-old boy awakening to his alternative sexuality, but where Luca Guadagnino’s louchely sensual film was made for festivals and arthouses, Berlanti’s clean-cut, decidedly un-queer one was made for malls and multiplexes: it’s largely sexless, edgeless and no peaches were harmed in the course of its production.

So why does Love, Simon feel, in its own uncool, milk-and-Oreos way, momentous – more so, if anything, than Guadagnino’s Oscar-winner? Partly, of course, it’s a matter of simple precedent, or lack thereof: the Fox release is the first major-studio film ever to centre on young gay romance, not an insubstantial milestone at a time when Hollywood, made dizzy by talk of black panthers and inclusion riders, is being forced to reassess its standards of representation.

But there are a number of ways Love, Simon could have been made and styled, and Berlanti opts for the safest, bringing to it the slick, brightly lit, hugs-and-tears sensibility of his TV empire – with less darkness even than his current hit Riverdale. It’s full of soapy conflict and teaching moments; as Simon’s parents, Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel both get to deliver dewy-eyed monologues on the preciousness of love and acceptance and family that resemble Michael Stuhlbarg’s climactic Call Me By Your Name speech as filtered through Chicken Soup For the Soul, and leave you dewy-eyed in turn. Even its soundtrack is produced by Jack Antonoff, current hitmaker for the likes of Taylor Swift: its hoody-wearing hero might fancy himself an offbeat rebel for listening to The Kinks, but the film is pure pop down its Converse-clad toes.

And yet there’s something strangely defiant – subversive, even – in that safeness: an assertion of mainstream identity that says LGBT storytelling has earned the right to be as naff and as conventional and as unconflicted as its fluffiest straight counterpart. Love, Simon is not entirely blinkered to the daily challenges and hostilities faced by the LGBT community even in a more enlightened age – bullying tenses up its narrative at cruelly direct and micro-aggressive levels – but – but it’s a film more preoccupied with happiness, togetherness and the rush of a first kiss, just as countless teen date movies have been for eons now. Most interestingly of all, it feels produced and packaged for an audience that won’t necessarily credit it as a milestone, for which its love story should feel as normal and unremarkable as its popcorn-movie presentation.

Berlanti has attempted to normalise the gay romantic comedy before, albeit with a more mature target market: 2000’s middle-of-the-road The Broken Hearts Club, centred on a circle of amiable gay friends in West Hollywood, was unusual at the time both for the casual familiarity it presumed of its audience, and for the relatively wholesome portrait it painted of a culture still largely depicted in Hollywood as sexually deviant and Aids-shadowed. But it remained a niche item, confined to the arthouse circuit despite being scarcely edgier than an episode of Ally McBeal and grossing just £1.5 million worldwide.

Love, Simon, meanwhile, will be getting a wider release than Berlanti’s first film could ever have dreamed of, and it remains to be seen if children of the 21st century will even rally around it: it might be that the film seems more essential or remarkable to a generation of gay men that, like Berlanti, didn’t have any Love, Simons to mirror their own adolescent crises growing up. Writing for Time, Daniel D’Addario wondered if the film has missed its cultural moment: “Kids like Simon, in 2018, already have a good shot of fitting in. They don’t need this movie.”

That might be over-idealising a world in which youthful homosexuality still meets with ugly opposition in many cultures, and underselling the personal difficulty of coming out even in the most favourable circumstances, which Love, Simon depicts with some clarity and compassion. As Simon tells his digital penpal in voiceover, he ultimately knows his friends and family will embrace him either way, but that still doesn’t make it a cinch. I’d like to think some nervously closeted high-schoolers will go to see Love, Simon and feel seen in turn, and maybe a little emboldened by its pat happy ending – one that follows a run of recent films, including Carol and God’s Own Country, in reversing the tragic arc that was once standard in LGBT cinema, but with fewer compromises and qualifiers in its hero’s sparkly future.

Others might well greet it with a shrug, but that may itself be a kind of victory, or at least a turning point. If, years from now, cornball feelgood crowdpleasers about LGBT characters are commonplace in our multiplexes, and Love, Simon is remembered – if at all – only for having preceded the lot of them, then Berlanti’s gratifyingly, unchallengingly adorable film will have done its job.